It’s always challenging to decide “fault” when considering America’s continuing failure to remain the world’s most powerful nation as it was for more than 50 years.
America’s power to produce remained after the war as we continued Lend Lease by sending a recovering Europe and South America the money to buy whatever they needed from America as they recovered.
Today we see China in that very position America had known for so long… producing so much of what the World needs in all fields. The Chinese just reported that last year they achieved a one trillion dollar income from exporting…an amount only matched by America at the end of WWII.
Looking for fault we wonder why there is an increasing feeling that this essentially economic rivalry could lead to armed conflict singularly because America cannot match China’s productivity and we wonder why America cannot again produce goods that the World needs and develop a manufacturing rivalry that capitalism encourages and supports.
One tries not to conclude that there was once an America that no longer exists.
And that’s when looking for “fault” comes into play.
EDUCATION CRUMBLES
Our public education system once a World leader especially in higher education, has crumbled.
Today’s 34 year old man or woman cannot sign their name on a legal document and cannot add or subtract fast enough to make change.
After WWII America was the world’s leading educational provider. It offered America’s veterans a free college education and had a strong commitment to educating its young people.
As we did then, we continue to provide a home for the world’s foreign students at the university level, so much so that today’s foreign students are urged to return to the States before Donald Trump becomes President so that they are not caught in a movement to oust immigrants of all types.
But what is increasingly obvious is that our commitment to a strong early and secondary education for American youngsters has faded with the passing years.
Once again WWII provides a negative benchmark.
America’s elementary school system rested on a very solid tripod: A teacher, a student, a Mom.
As more and more women were encouraged to join the work force to keep up with the war effort- and did – one leg of that tripod weakened and finally collapsed as would any system dependent upon such a balance.
With women in the workforce at a level never seen in America, those in charge of education failed to design a new approach that would reflect the loss and overcome it.
The teaching of teachers did not change nor did the expectation of success.
But there was no way success could be found to make up for the loss of parental involvement at home.
Attempts to halt a very evident decline that would not stop have existed for years. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published “A Nation at Risk” warning of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education that “threatened the future of our Nation and its people”.
The report was a predictor of things to come.
Our political leaders responded with a series of federal initiatives such as George W. Bushes “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s ”Race to the Top” – both of which were accompanied by major State level reforms to boost achievement.
This direct political involvement in education led to an insistence on testing – continuous testing – as the key indicator of student performance and as the guide to improvement.
For those responsible for student improvement – teachers, administrators, the very public education system itself – the testing approach failed miserably.
Recently, the New York Times reported that American students had turned in “grim results” in the latest international test of math skills. Fourth graders had dropped 18 points since 2019 while 8th graders had dropped 27 points.
Math scores of all 4th and 8th graders – high and low performing students – had fallen.
While it is easy to see how closing schools because of Covid caused these huge drops in performance, the truth is that they had been falling before Covid.
As for reading, the failures were even more obvious. Reports show that in 2019 two-thirds of American children could not read at grade level. There is evidence to suggest that the number has changed to three-quarters of our children unable to read at grade level.
Only 7% of American children scored at the highest levels in math and still trailed most of the major Asian countries.
This decline in math and reading was seen in other areas of education as well.
Faced with this failure, individual States such as New York and western States have lowered standards – adjusting passing scores on standardized testing or on what is considered proficiency.
Meanwhile, America remains a source of continuing higher education for an even larger number of foreign students. There is an 80% increase in enrollment by foreign students taking the seats of Americans no longer entering college or post graduate programs.
Immigrant students now make up one-quarter of all students enrolled in STEM fields…science, technology, math and engineering.
Immigrants, many of them from India – here on special Visas since the Clinton Administration – are running most of the companies now doing extraordinary business in ‘high tech.’ It is where the action is.
Once parents were part of a teaching process with an obvious intense focus and a high regard for doing well in school.
All of that disappeared with parents otherwise occupied, wanting only that children enjoy the experience of school.
The questions about subject matter and focus have been lost to questions about whether a child was happy in school.
Happiness has become the measurement for whether school is succeeding for our children.
How is that doing?
In third grade, 70% of children say they are happy in school.
By tenth grade only 10% are happy…seeing school as a form of prison where what they know and care about doesn’t seem to be worth teaching them.
It is as if no one cares.
HEALTHCARE: IT’S A GAME
American medical researchers and scientists continue to win a fair amount of Nobel Prizes. Yet, our healthcare system is ranked well down the list… trailing such wealthy and sophisticated nations as Latvia, for instance.
Today, the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer- is Medical Malpractice. Our healthcare system is under the total control of the medical insurance companies and Big Pharma.
And that has led to an endless stream of business inspired advertising designed to ignore the realities that exist.
Despite all the commercials and all the promises, Medicare Advantage has nothing to do with Medicare. Medicare Advantage insurance companies have nothing to do with those involved with Medicare. They offer a whole series of rewards like dental and eye care, free rides to the doctor, even a return of monies to an individual’s monthly healthcare payments…even as they refuse to pay for the largest number of tests and expensive medical treatments.
Increasingly, Medicare itself does not give hospitals and physicians the money promised them in the agreements they sign.
Look at a monthly report from someone on Medicare.
You will see a promise of a specific amount for a surgery to both the hospital and the surgical staff – and then under the heading Medicare paid, a very different amount —considerably less.
It is no wonder that many in medical training, faced with high expenses for their education, decide not to become doctors but rather Nurse Practitioners.
And one wonders at the cost of working in the Medicare system. Medicare promised to pay NYU Langone $30,000 for a routine cataract surgery. Instead they paid $13,900.
Medicare promised to pay the surgeon $4,900 for the cataract surgery…instead they paid $1,490 for his work.
The cost and payment for medical care has driven physicians to join corporations so they can earn a good salary without the problems of payment for their work.
Money has now become THE driving force in the practice of medicine and in the choices and decisions that doctors and hospitals make.
That reality has weakened the performance within the system and has pushed American medicine to new lows in expectation and a new and growing lack of confidence in decisions being made.
Once one loses confidence in a physician’s decision and begins wondering whether it is being made for monetary reasons and not scientific understanding, the relationships between doctors and patients change and in very serious ways.
Hospitals serving those on the outskirts and deep into communities far from convenience are suffering from serious money shortages and are either limiting services or closing entirely.
We see pharmacies closing, including large chains, because they will not meet or defend the cost of drugs or the growing existence of the pharma changes – so that online pharmacies are better able to deliver those drugs faster than local stores.
The problems outlined here are real and demand solutions that work to make America stronger.
What a group of policy makers with a specific agenda design – make government smaller, end civil service and employ only those who want to serve a President, solve problems that essentially hurt the corporate world and make certain little money exists for problem solving that makes America stronger – will not make our straining foundational systems stronger and more capable.
America is not about the past.
America is not about tradition.
America is about what we do next to make our strengths and talents work…
Is what we do next to fix obvious weaknesses, failures and disappointments…
Is what we do next to offset changes in government policies that work to support a few and ignore the many.
In its more than 80 years, the Liberal Party has helped bring great change to the liberalization of New York State policies and programs which have then influenced the rest of the country.
But we have not had a serious candidate for major public office in New York for years. The very word “liberal” has become a liability which has opened the door to the youngest political players who have no idea what programs will work to fulfill their ideas for a better New York.
And yet despite the highs and lows, it is what we will do next that marks us as a vital part of the American scene.
Doing is what counts. Caring is not enough. But if it doesn’t start with caring, it doesn’t start at all.